~ a New Yorker's American History blog

Sunday morning coffee

I noted with pleasure earlier this week that the bibliographic information for volume one of Mark Lewisohn’s three-part history of the Beatles has just been released here in the U.S. (It had been on Amazon’s UK website for some time now.) It is titled All These Years: Tune In and brings the Fabs up to 31 December 1962, on the cusp of Beatlemania. Tune In has been in the works for nearly a decade now and is destined to be a huge deal in the Beatles’s historiography. As with Civil War historiography, there is much we have to unlearn about the Beatles before we understand their true history and significance. So much of what we “know” is simply the same self-serving narratives and folk tales told again and again until becoming accepted as fact. That will not be a problem with Tune In and the two volumes that come after it. Lewisohn is one of a handful of people who can pull off such a magnum opus. I would say Bruce Spizer and Allan Kozinn are probably the only two others.

Lewisohn has said that there will be an “official cut” and longer “author’s cut” with greater detail. Unfortunately it appears there are no plans to release the author’s cut in the United States for the time being, though the publisher is leaving its options open. The smaller version still logs in at 1,200 pages. Interested parties may want to pre-order from their online bookseller.